The chaps at Powerline are doing the dirty on the College Board's Advanced Placement courses for US and European History. They don't like the knee-jerk leftism of the curriculum.
The critics of AP History syllabi complain that the College Board rehearses the liberal line of a consistent move from superstition to "secular modernization," and leaves out stuff like the history of economic freedom and liberty. Nothing about the Soviets' Ukraine famine. Nothing about the fact that the anti-slavery movement was "inspired by religious faith" of Christians like William Wilberforce.
That set me to thinking about how I would frame European and US history.
Wait. Before framing US and European History I would be framing the human story in an overall Grand Narrative, one in which the liberal notion of "secular modernization" would be a curious millennarian cult of our time significant in its pious faith that it had escaped from the superstition of former times and oblivious to its own superstitions and naivété.
That's because my faith is that religion is a constant in all human eras, and the idea that we are now "above" religion is a pious fraud. The reason is simple. The whole question of "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything," cunningly developed by Douglas Adams in his Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, never goes away. The whole point of religion whether a totemic tribal religion, an Axial Age religion, or a modern secular religion like socialism or progressivism, is the eternal human need to determine the meaning of life, the universe, and everything right now as a guide for living life right now. But the truth is that we don't know the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, and we are not likely to find out any time soon. Indeed, I say that the more we know about the universe, and science, and stuff, the more we realize how little we know, and the more mysterious the whole question of meaning becomes.
I suppose the liberal line is that humans were stuck in religious superstition and ignorance until the Renaissance came along and then, with the Age of Reason, humans found that they could understand the world using Science without imagining spirits in trees and God in his Heaven. What people needed was good enlightened teachers that understood the new world.
But if you ask me, Martin Luther King Jr's faith that the arc of history bends towards justice, echoed by President Obama, is just as much of a religious faith as the Christian faith in God's justice and the Last Judgement.
My theory of history, curiously, is fairly close to the Marxian theory, that the economy, the way that people get food and shelter, is the base, and religion and culture are a superstructure built upon the foundations established by the economic facts on the ground. So in my view the "progress" of recent centuries is more a reaction to economic changes than to any enlightenment.
So my Grand Narrative starts with the rise of the city in Mesopotamia (and doubtless in China and India) in the two millennia before Christ. The point of a city is that it is a place where trading and markets happen. And that is where the Axial Age religions got started. Why? Because whereas life in the country is governed by the weather and the collective defense of the border, the life of the city is an individual affair. And so you get the phenomenon recorded by preachers as late as the Great Awakening in the Anglo-Saxon world in the 18th century.
Up until about 1850 I think we can understand history as people gradually moving to the city and picking up the culture and the religion of responsibility.
But in 1850 a new world dawns, the epoch of creativity. We are now in a new Great Awakening, the awakening to creativity. So a teacher of creativity might say:
The critics of AP History syllabi complain that the College Board rehearses the liberal line of a consistent move from superstition to "secular modernization," and leaves out stuff like the history of economic freedom and liberty. Nothing about the Soviets' Ukraine famine. Nothing about the fact that the anti-slavery movement was "inspired by religious faith" of Christians like William Wilberforce.
That set me to thinking about how I would frame European and US history.
Wait. Before framing US and European History I would be framing the human story in an overall Grand Narrative, one in which the liberal notion of "secular modernization" would be a curious millennarian cult of our time significant in its pious faith that it had escaped from the superstition of former times and oblivious to its own superstitions and naivété.
That's because my faith is that religion is a constant in all human eras, and the idea that we are now "above" religion is a pious fraud. The reason is simple. The whole question of "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything," cunningly developed by Douglas Adams in his Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, never goes away. The whole point of religion whether a totemic tribal religion, an Axial Age religion, or a modern secular religion like socialism or progressivism, is the eternal human need to determine the meaning of life, the universe, and everything right now as a guide for living life right now. But the truth is that we don't know the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, and we are not likely to find out any time soon. Indeed, I say that the more we know about the universe, and science, and stuff, the more we realize how little we know, and the more mysterious the whole question of meaning becomes.
I suppose the liberal line is that humans were stuck in religious superstition and ignorance until the Renaissance came along and then, with the Age of Reason, humans found that they could understand the world using Science without imagining spirits in trees and God in his Heaven. What people needed was good enlightened teachers that understood the new world.
But if you ask me, Martin Luther King Jr's faith that the arc of history bends towards justice, echoed by President Obama, is just as much of a religious faith as the Christian faith in God's justice and the Last Judgement.
My theory of history, curiously, is fairly close to the Marxian theory, that the economy, the way that people get food and shelter, is the base, and religion and culture are a superstructure built upon the foundations established by the economic facts on the ground. So in my view the "progress" of recent centuries is more a reaction to economic changes than to any enlightenment.
So my Grand Narrative starts with the rise of the city in Mesopotamia (and doubtless in China and India) in the two millennia before Christ. The point of a city is that it is a place where trading and markets happen. And that is where the Axial Age religions got started. Why? Because whereas life in the country is governed by the weather and the collective defense of the border, the life of the city is an individual affair. And so you get the phenomenon recorded by preachers as late as the Great Awakening in the Anglo-Saxon world in the 18th century.
When we began to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages... they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings, and that a refusal to used the means appointed was a damning sin.My belief is that everyone above the rank of peasant or proletarian, and anyone living in a city, needs to learn to live life as a "responsible being," and it is my belief that the Axial Age religions are the religions of responsible beings that live in cities and need to think of God as a creator of the universe that says to his people: you figure this out and learn how to wive and thrive in a world by following rules and finding ways of serving your fellow humans. In such an economic environment humans start to need a culture of freedom and liberty because no king or government planner can have enough knowledge to tell people how to serve their fellow humans: each of us must do that for ourselves. And as the cities have gotten bigger and bigger, and more and more of the human population has come to live and work in cities, the need for people to take up the challenge of individual responsibility has grown. But as long as most people were still on the land growing food this culture did not dominate the world. Peasants lived as fatalists and the subordinate serfs of lords that provided them "protection" in its full meaning, including the notion of a protection racket. And that was good enough.
Up until about 1850 I think we can understand history as people gradually moving to the city and picking up the culture and the religion of responsibility.
But in 1850 a new world dawns, the epoch of creativity. We are now in a new Great Awakening, the awakening to creativity. So a teacher of creativity might say:
When we began to teach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages... they seemed to see for the first time that they were creative beings, and that a refusal to used the means appointed was nothing less than deplorable.
My takeup of Deirdre McCloskey's Great Enrichment partakes of this. The reason, on McCloskey's account, that per-capita income has risen by 3,000 percent in the last 200 years is innovation, innovation that has not been snuffed out by the powers that be.
So I would say that the cultural superstructure that allows innovation must be both a culture of responsibility, that has been around for the last 3,000 years in the city, and also a culture of creativity, the faith that it is possible to think new thoughts and invent new things and not have the world come to an end.
Hello. It looks like my reductive Three Peoples theory has snuck its nose in the tent again, since we are talking here about three cultures: creativity, responsibility, and subordination.
Now, in my view, this new Age of Innovation has taken us completely by surprise, and we are still trying to figure out what happened. But that also means we are in another Axial Age, in which people will be reinventing the idea of religion, trying to understand the meaning of life, the universe, and everything in light of the new facts on the ground.
Naturally, when people invent a new religion they tend to think only of their own needs and not how other people fit into their view of the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. Thus our liberal friends make a big deal of their culture of creativity, including demanding that Christian bakers bake cakes for gay weddings.
Now, in my view it is great for gays to go out and get all creative about sex and get married and all. But it is grossly un-compassionate of them -- not to mention bigoted -- to demand that everyone bows the knee to their creative views on sex. For one thing, as Schopenhauer pointed out, the successful creator is one in a million. In our modern notion it means that tons of people want to be creative artists, but only a very few have the chops to make it and the luck to get the support of a Peggy Guggenheim.
Here is how I think the new religion of creativity should look. It should be first of all a religion of sacrifice. Creative artists should expect to be failures, and very humble if they get to succeed. Second, it should be a religion of compassion, meaning its believers should be compassionate for people that are not called to be creative, don't understand about creativity, and don't want to be creative.
So if I were designing the syllabus for AP history we would be looking at the past through the lens of my Three Peoples theory, and understanding how radical the new world is, and expecting that most actors in history would be complete idiots, rehearsing the old ways in a world they don't understand. We would, for instance, be very compassionate about liberal educators that don't have a clue. What could we expect? That a million educational lifers would suddenly get wisdom?
I am one of those liberal educators, albeit with a whole heck of a lot of clues, bestowed with the greatest of honors: guiding the next generation.
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